Hi all, I will be working on NK92 and may I know if it is better to use retroviral or lentiviral vector if i would like to express a gene in the NK cell cell line?
Thanks alot!
Hello Kar Wei Chin
Lentiviral vectors are less genotoxic and represent a safer option for genetic engineering, but the efficiency of lentiviral transduction is inefficient for NK cells and has remained variable requiring multiple rounds of transduction and/or post transduction cell enrichment to achieve acceptable transgene expression. So, lentiviral transduction may be the method of choice for genetic engineering when it comes to safety for therapeutic applications. Moreover, lentiviral vectors can incorporate transgenes into the genome of non-dividing cells.
On the other hand, retroviral transduction requires active cell division. Therefore, retroviral transduction may be utilized with NK cell lines such as NK-92, which you will be working on, that have continuous and unlimited proliferation capacity. Moreover, higher transduction of expanded NK cells have been reported in several studies with retroviral vectors.
You may want to refer to the articles attached below for more information.
Article Efficient gene transfer into primary human natural killer ce...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0022175917301163
https://www.hindawi.com/journals/jir/2018/4054815/
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fimmu.2015.00266/full
Best.